Energy & Environment
Documents & Texts from the White House
09 July 2008
Declaration of Leaders Meeting of Major Economies on Energy Security and Climate Change
We, the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union,
France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea,
Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States
met as the world's major economies in Toyako, Hokkaido, Japan, on 9
July, 2008, and declare as follows:
1. Climate change is one of the great global challenges of our time.
Conscious of our leadership role in meeting such challenges, we, the
leaders of the world's major economies, both developed and developing,
commit to combat climate change in accordance with our common but
differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and confront
the interlinked challenges of sustainable development, including energy
and food security, and human health. We have come together to
contribute to efforts under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate
Change, the global forum for climate negotiations. Our contribution and
cooperation are rooted in the objective, provisions, and principles of
the Convention.
2. We welcome decisions taken by the international community in Bali,
including to launch a comprehensive process to enable the full,
effective, and sustained implementation of the Convention through
long-term cooperative action, now, up to, and beyond 2012, in order to
reach an agreed outcome in December 2009. Recognizing the scale and
urgency of the challenge, we will continue working together to
strengthen implementation of the Convention and to ensure that the
agreed outcome maximizes the efforts of all nations and contributes to
achieving the ultimate objective in Article 2 of the Convention, which
should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to
adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not
threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a
sustainable manner.
3. The Major Economies Meetings constructively contribute to the Bali
process in several ways:
* First, our dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels
has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding
of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider
next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilize political will
to combat global climate change.
* Second, without prejudging outcomes or the views of other
nations, we believe that the common understandings in this Declaration
will help advance the work of the international community so it is
possible to reach an agreed outcome by the end of 2009.
* Third, recognizing the need for urgent action and the Bali
Action Plan's directive for enhanced implementation of the Convention
between now and 2012, we commit to taking the actions in paragraph 10
without delay.
4. We support a shared vision for long-term cooperative action,
including a long-term global goal for emission reductions, that assures
growth, prosperity, and other aspects of sustainable development,
including major efforts towards sustainable consumption and production,
all aimed at achieving a low carbon society. Taking account of the
science, we recognize that deep cuts in global emissions will be
necessary to achieve the Convention's ultimate objective, and that
adaptation will play a correspondingly vital role. We believe that it
would be desirable for the Parties to adopt in the negotiations under
the Convention a long-term global goal for reducing global emissions,
taking into account the principle of equity. We urge that serious
consideration be given in particular to ambitious IPCC scenarios.
Significant progress toward a long-term global goal will be made by
increasing financing of the broad deployment of existing technologies
and best practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build
climate resilience. However, our ability ultimately to achieve a
long-term global goal will also depend on affordable, new, more
advanced, and innovative technologies, infrastructure, and practices
that transform the way we live, produce and use energy, and manage land.
5. Taking into account assessments of science, technology, and
economics, we recognize the essential importance of enhanced greenhouse
gas mitigation that is ambitious, realistic, and achievable. We will do
more - we will continue to improve our policies and our performance
while meeting other priority objectives - in keeping with the principle
of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective
capabilities. Achieving our long-term global goal requires respective
mid-term goals, commitments and actions, to be reflected in the agreed
outcome of the Bali Action Plan, taking into account differences in
social and economic conditions, energy mix, demographics, and
infrastructure among other factors, and the above IPCC scenarios. In
this regard, the developed major economies will implement, consistent
with international obligations, economy-wide mid-term goals and take
corresponding actions in order to achieve absolute emission reductions
and, where applicable, first stop the growth of emissions as soon as
possible, reflecting comparable efforts among them. At the same time,
the developing major economies will pursue, in the context of
sustainable development, nationally appropriate mitigation actions,
supported and enabled by technology, financing and capacity-building,
with a view to achieving a deviation from business as usual emissions.
6. We recognize that actions to reduce emissions, including from
deforestation and forest degradation, and to increase removals by sinks
in the land use, land use change, and forestry sector, including
cooperation on tackling forest fires, can make a contribution to
stabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These actions also
reduce climate change impacts and can have significant co-benefits by
maintaining multiple economic goods and ecological services. Our
nations will continue to cooperate on capacity-building and
demonstration activities; on innovative solutions, including financing,
to reduce emissions and increase removals by sinks; and on
methodological issues. We also stress the need to improve
forest-related governance and cooperative actions at all levels.
7. We recognize that adaptation is vital to addressing the effects of
inevitable climate change and that the adverse impacts of climate change
are likely to affect developing countries disproportionately. We will
work together in accordance with our Convention commitments to
strengthen the ability of developing countries, particularly the most
vulnerable ones, to adapt to climate change. This includes the
development and dissemination of tools and methodologies to improve
vulnerability and adaptation assessments, the integration of climate
change adaptation into overall development strategies, increased
implementation of adaptation strategies, increased emphasis on
adaptation technologies, strengthening resilience and reducing
vulnerability, and consideration of means to stimulate investment and
increased availability of financial and technical assistance.
8. We affirm the critical role of technology and the need for
technological breakthroughs in meeting the interlinked global challenges
of energy security and climate change. In the near term, broader
deployment of many existing technologies will be vital for both
mitigation and adaptation. In particular, energy conservation, energy
efficiency, disaster reduction, and water and natural resource
management technologies are important. We will promote the uptake and
use of such technologies including renewables, cleaner and low-carbon
technologies, and, for those of us interested, nuclear power.
Technology cooperation with and transfer to developing countries are
also vital in this effort, as is promoting capacity building. For the
longer term, research, development, demonstration, deployment, and
transfer of innovative technologies will be crucial, and we acknowledge
the need to enhance our investment and collaboration in these areas.
Mindful of the important role of a range of alternative energy
technologies, we recognize, in particular, the need for research,
development, and large-scale demonstration of and cooperation on carbon
capture and storage. We also note the value of technology roadmaps as
tools to promote continuous investment and cooperation in clean energy
research, development, demonstration, and deployment.
9. We recognize that tackling climate change will require greater
mobilization of financial resources, both domestically and
internationally. There is an urgent need to scale up financial flows,
particularly financial support to developing countries; to create
positive incentives for actions; to finance the incremental costs of
cleaner and low-carbon technologies; to make more efficient use of funds
directed toward climate change; to realize the full potential of
appropriate market mechanisms that can provide pricing signals and
economic incentives to the private sector; to promote public sector
investment; to create enabling environments that promote private
investment that is commercially viable; to develop innovative
approaches; and to lower costs by creating appropriate incentives for
and reducing and eliminating obstacles to technology transfer relevant
to both mitigation and adaptation.
10. To enable the full, effective, and sustained implementation of the
Convention between now and 2012, we will:
* Work together on mitigation-related technology cooperation
strategies in specific economic sectors, promote the exchange of
mitigation information and analysis on sectoral efficiency, the
identification of national technology needs and voluntary,
action-oriented international cooperation, and consider the role of
cooperative sectoral approaches and sector-specific actions, consistent
with the Convention;
* Direct our trade officials responsible for WTO issues to
advance with a sense of urgency their discussions on issues relevant to
promoting our cooperation on climate change;
* Accelerate enhanced action on technology development, transfer,
financing, and capacity building to support mitigation and adaptation
efforts;
* Support implementation of the Nairobi Work Programme on
impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation to climate change;
* Improve significantly energy efficiency, a low-cost way to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance energy security;
* Continue to promote actions under the Montreal Protocol on
Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer for the benefit of the global
climate system; and
* Intensify our efforts without delay within existing fora to
improve effective greenhouse gas measurement.
11. Our nations will continue to work constructively together to
promote the success of the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009.
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